How to research ancestors brought to the United States as indentured servants.

Q. My
fifth-great-grandfather Nathaniel Tenpenny was convicted of a crime in
England in 1764 and sentenced to seven years of indentured servitude in
America. He was transported aboard the Tryal the same year.
He’s in the 1790 Rowan County, NC, census with his family, but I
haven’t been able to find out their names or anything else about him.

A.
An indentured servant was “bound” to a property owner in exchange for
passage to America. Many people indentured themselves. Your ancestor
was part of a popular criminal justice trend in England: Punishment by
"transportation," or exile to work in America (after the Revolutionary
War, Australia became the primary destination).

After England
passed the Transportation Act in 1718, courts there sent approximately
60,000 convicts—called "the King's passengers"—to America.

Look for your ancestor’s name in two books by Peter Wilson Coldham:The Complete Book of Emigrants in Bondage, 1614-1775 and Emigrants in Chains, 1607-1776. Both are $45 from Clearfield Co. You may learn the port where his ship arrived and other details, giving you a starting point.

There’s a good chance your ancestor served his sentence in Maryland or Virginia. According to a 2004 NPR report, 90 percent of the King’s Passengers served their sentences in Maryland and Virginia.

Laws
governed indentured servitude (servants who tried to run away or became
pregnant, for example, might have their contracts extended), so look
for
contracts and other documents among court records
where your ancestor served. If you learn whom he
was indentured to, check the local historical society and university
archives for collections of personal papers—they may mention
Nathaniel.

To narrow Nathaniel's place of service, research him
backward from his most recent known location—North Carolina in the 1790
census. Look for Colonial censuses, land and tax records. Presumably
Nathaniel would've been released in the early 1770s. Could he have
returned to England temporarily? Stayed in America and fought in the
Revolutionary War?

Look for his will, too, which would likely
give the names of his children and wife. For additional resources, see
the Colonial research article in the February 2006 Family Tree Magazine.

To learn more about prisoners and indentured servants, explore these sites:

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